From the Editor

Are you reading this online? I suspect that many of you are, from my forays into Google Analytics. Most popular section? Class notes, of course. Articles that keep getting a lot of views, long past their print date? A 2018 interview with Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music, about her book Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune and our winter 2022 feature “How Math Can Save Democracy.” I love how the internet extends the life of our stories and brings them to people beyond the alum community.

If you’re among those reading this on your smartphone or laptop, you’ll have noticed that the magazine website looks quite different. This fall, with our colleagues in Communications and Public Affairs, Library and Technology Services, and Baltimore-based design firm Fastspot, we redesigned the alumnae magazine website for the first time in a decade. We hope you’ll enjoy the changes, from easier navigation to past class notes columns to more prominent displays of our award-winning photography and illustration.

This fall, I happened to spend some time thinking about the College’s earliest days online, thanks to a request for an interview from Brooke Bao ’26, who was doing a group project on Wellesley’s evolving communication technologies as part of the course PHIL 222/CS299 Research Methods on Ethics of Technology. My WCAA colleague (and best friend since first year) Emily Rankin Welch ’99 and I gave Brooke the lowdown on the early days of the internet at Wellesley, back when we would log in to Sallie (the server that hosted email) from desktops hard-wired into the campus’s local area network. We told Brooke about the raucous online forum Public (which became Community in 1999, when the campus moved to FirstClass; which morphed into Community, a Facebook group for Wellesley alums), and how friend groups would take over defunct class bulletin boards to serve as a sort of group text. (My friends took over Western Civ.)

As Emily and I spoke with Brooke, it became clear that while the technology we use has changed, online Wellesley culture has very much stayed the same. We’re drawn to each other, and we look to each other for advice, support, and laughter. The internet makes that a lot easier, especially after graduation, and I think the positives of these digital spaces far outweigh the negatives. But there is a lot to be said for the physical world—and the printed page. If you haven’t opted in to receive the print magazine, I highly recommend it (alum.wellesley. edu/sendmagazine). And please write in (magazine@wellesley.edu) and let us know what you think about the new website and the print magazine.